b. 1968, San Jose, CA
Lives and works in Portland, OR
California-native Chris Johanson is a key member of San Francisco’s Mission School. Johanson engages with the meditative qualities of art-making and sincere direct communication through painting and sculpture. Johanson’s work plays between the techniques of figuration and abstraction, as he sees these two modes of working as interconnected expressions of strong beliefs in environmentalism, compassion and peaceful co-existence.
Chris Johanson was born in San Jose, California in 1968 and is based in Portland. He has exhibited widely in museums and galleries internationally over the past decade. His work has been the subject of solo shows at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2021); Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2018); the Portland Museum of Art, Portland (2014); the Modern Institute, Glasgow (2013); and Kavi Gupta, Chicago (2010).
Johanson has been featured in important group exhibitions including G Gallery, Seoul; Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; the Benaki Museum, Athens; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Utopian Slumps, Melbourne; Depart Foundation, Rome; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; as well as the 2012 Glasgow International and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Johanson’s work is included in the public collections of the Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
All images © Chris Johanson.
